slim I said, "...and even the NYPD insists they don't have quotas," which is true. They do insist that. Whether they do have quotas or not is another question, but I've never seen any evidence for it. (Personally, I think they're just hard-butt period, and if they do have a quota, it's likely they well exceed it with their viciousness.) The point was that they aren't even trying that strategy, at least publicly. And you can't read the three or four posts where I discussed that in detail? The Power of WomenGoebbels speech on March 18, 1933: "German women, German men ! It is a happy accident that my first speech since taking charge of the Ministry for Propaganda and People's Enlightenment is... Here's the short explanation of one tactic (regarding economic efficiency): the trick is to take advantage of a peculiar mathematical irony called Braess's Paradox. Basically, the intuition of most people, including planners, is that increasing capacity in turn improves efficiency. This is true in some circumstances, but not in others. With street traffic, the problem is that increasing capacity ("supply") increases usage ("demand"). You see this all the time, but it was never really understood until recently: when a new highway is built, it's immediately jammed. The trick is to find a more stable equilibrium, by reducing the perceived payoffs of using the space, thereby reducing demand to an efficient level. For an absurdly scaled down model, imagine equilibrium capacity of a roadway is 10 people using it each day. If there are 10 people or fewer than 10 people, there's no problem, and plenty of capacity. Say, however, 11 people are using the roadway, so it's a tad slow. An extra lane is added to the roadway, so now the optimum capacity is 20 people. But the extra lane induces demand for 15 more people, so now 26 are using, and it's even more jammed than before. Braess's Paradox doesn't only apply to traffic, but to a lot of systems, including computer networks. (You see kind of a related problem with transit planning, especially in suburbs. When a new rail line gets built, some people start using it. Other people take their places on the local highway system, so the transit line doesn't really improve highway efficiency with the demand it induces.) If it's not necessary then, I don't see why such a thing as a toll charge needs to be enforced at night.
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